Clayton Morris – Building Legacy Wealth Through Real Estate Investing

Morris Invest brings proven know-how and depth of experience to the turnkey rental and buy-to-hold investing strategies. Maybe you work a full time job and want to get financially ahead so you’ve taken on a second or even a third job. Great that you have ambition but you probably already know how physically and mentally exhausting working multiple jobs can be. Now is the time to try the worker smarter – not harder approach. That’s where passive income from turnkey rentals becomes your secret to financial freedom.

If you regularly follow reals estate investing news, you are aware of the important trends in today’s housing market. For the past several years, homeownership in America has steadily been declining although income from the strong employment market has been driving new household formation. The strong trend in household formation has been in rental properties. As a real estate investor, you should be very familiar with the turnkey rental strategy.

Find Your Niche and Market

Clayton Morris, president of Morris Invest, focuses on turnkey rentals but shares a wide variety of investing information by podcasting interviews with people active in the industry every day. Recently, Clayton and I spoke on the subject of “What’s Going On With the Current Market?” Other recent subjects on the morrisinvest.com/podcast include “The 1% Rule for Real Estate Investing” and “Why Warren Buffett is Excited About Real Estate Investing”.

What Morris Invest offers to the individual and beginning investor is the opportunity for turnkey investments in the most profitable markets. Major markets like Seattle, San Francisco, and Florida can certainly be relied on for solid appreciation in value. However, the capital cost of investment in these major markets is daunting for beginning investors. This isn’t only a problem for making an initial investment but the high cost is also a hurdle to owning multiple properties, leaving investors overly dependent on a passive income from a single rental unit.

This makes the more affordable cities in the Midwest more attractive because the median regional home prices remain the lowest and appreciation is outpacing the other major U.S. geographic regions (NAR®). Unless the best market is in your local market, you’re probably leaving money on the table. Real estate investing is always about location, location, location. The advantage of turnkey investing is having knowledgeable people with feet on the ground in the best neighborhoods and cities.

Simple Turnkey Process

The process to rental investing is simple and complex at the same time. It’s simple because there are only three basic steps. It’s complex because each of those steps require a level of skills and knowledge that most beginning investors don’t have.

Find and purchase the property. You need to know how to evaluate several criteria. One is the purchase cost. You want low cost but not cheap. Stay away from cheap ganglands where vandalism is rampant and rents go unpaid for months at a time. You want working and middle-income neighborhoods where people are working, raising families, and take care of their belongings. Today, the Midwest offers the best deals for these properties. The second most important criteria is being able to evaluate and estimate repair costs – before buying. Low cost isn’t a good deal if it’s going to cost so much to rehab the property that it doesn’t deliver your desired level of passive income.

Rehabbing an ugly duckling. If you buy a rental just down the street, you’ll probably be able to put new coats of paint on the interior and exterior during you spare time (this could be your 2nd or 3rd job). However, if new flooring, wall demolition, new furnace, a new roof, or other major rehab is needed, someone needs to hire and mange tradespeople. If the property is in another city or state, you’ll need knowledgeable people to hire manage the activity.

Proven management team. This is how you place qualified tenants in your rental property. Renter applicant backgrounds must be verified. Credit checks, background checks, and landlord history (timely rent payments) are the backbone of this process. As a landlord, you also need to be in full compliance with local and federal housing regulations. The process needs to be repeated whenever a vacancy happens.

Please share your thoughts about the turnkey rental strategy or another real estate related subject by leaving a comment below.

Author bio: Brian Kline has been investing in real estate for more than 35 years and writing about real estate investing for eleven years. He also draws upon 25 plus years of business experience including 12 years as a manager at Boeing Aircraft Company. Brian currently lives at Lake Cushman, Washington. A vacation destination, a few short miles from a national forest in the Olympic Mountains with the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles in the opposite direction.